Stage

...cannot embrace the offer of the man...

...Offstage, Hally's mother has gone to the hospital where, at the father's insistence and over Hally's outraged protests, she takes the man back to their home...

...It takes place during a rainy afternoon in the customerless St...

...It is an ambiguous ending...

...A viewer, uplifted by the best qualities in Sam, may see the dance as an attempt to recreate the dream of the ballroom which, as Sam explicates the symbol for Hally earlier in the play, represents a world in which people move with ease and joy without bumping one another...

...Zakes Mokae, who plays Sam, is a slightly chubby man who moves with grace early in the play, as Sam demonstrates the quick step for Willie...

...A viewer, burdened by the destructiveness of Hally, may see the final dance as a ludicrous image of a society in which Sam and Willie are forced into the doubtful comfort of an unfulfilling unity within separateness...

...It is clear from the reminiscences of the three characters-particularly Hally, who most fondly remembers the day Sam built a kite for him-that they have been a group since the boy was very young, that Sam is a kind of surrogate father to make up for Hally's real father, who is both a cripple and a drunk...

...By the end of the play, however, the two men are dancing together-Sam leading, of course-in a final image that Pugard says is a memory out of his own past, one which provided the original impulse to create a play that would lead to that visual moment...

...Cut off, but perhaps not irrevocably...

...More important dramatically, it is obvious in the exchanges between Sam and Hally that they share a kind of intellectual equality in which Hally's occasional high-handed rejection of Sam's comments reflect a boy's attempt to master ideas, not to be master of the man who is both his teacher and his pupil...

...Sam has such a strong sense of his pedagogical role in relation to Hally that he becomes overtly didactic, explaining not only the meaning of ballroom dancing, but what he and Hally have done, are doing...

...He exits, alone, into the rain, heading for the homeless home, having cut off his one refuge...

...He does not say no, he says / don't know...

...Once he is gone, leaving a broken Sam who says that he has failed in his attempt to rescue the boy from the guilt he feels, Willie attempts a rescue operation of his own...

...Sam's anger is kept in check by Willie, by the society in which they live, by his own good sense and most of all by his compassion for his tormentor...

...In A Lesson from Aloes, where the titular image was not only presented but explained, Fugard showed a tendency toward direct teaching which has grown stronger in Master Harold...

...The intrusion of this news from the outside alters the atmosphere in the tearoom...

...He remakes himself in the image of his ignorant, racist, casually cruel natural father-or finds that white stereotype in himself-at the expense of the curious, incipiently perceptive boy who seems to be the product of the intelligence, the understanding, the inventiveness of his black father...

...Having said that if he once calls the boy "Master Harold'' he will never use the more familiar name, he relents at the end, calls him Hally again, suggests that they try to restore what has been lost, but the young man, crippled by shame and a kind of perverted pride (his father's son...

...He returns to the discussion of ballroom dancing with which the play opens-the central image in the drama-and lures Sam into trying a few steps...

...Hally's relentless drive to destroy what he most needs and loves has a dramatic and emotional validity that transcends Sam's, Fugard's need to explain the moment of dissolution...

...His shame and guilt are so great that he finally kills the father symbolically by attacking Sam at first with words, finally by spitting in his face...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Here, however, Hally does not grow up so much as grow away, unless growing up in South Africa in 1950 necessarily means withdrawal into a narrow world in which, however painful, men force themselves into racial and social pigeonholes...

...Master Harold is essentially a coming-of-age play (v...

...Now he moves with precision still, but with a leaden reluctance in the steps...

...Hally professes to love his father, but it is obvious that he hates the homelife created by the man's presence, the one that led him first to the sanctuary of the servants' room...

...Henry IV, Caesar and Cleopatra) in which a young person, schooled by circumstances and/or a teacher, becomes an adult...

...I prefer a play that keeps its meanings implicit, as in Fugard's early plays, but if a new urgency in the playwright-a response to the current situation in South Africa, a return to his own past-demands that he at once present and explicate, he does so with the skill of a major artist...

...Georges Park Tea Room, in which the two black employees, Sam and Willie, and the adolescent son of the owner fill the time with apparently idle and often funny conversation which turns ugly and destructive before the final curtain...